As Siobhan Garrigan, who studies English at the University of Lincoln,
puts it: "Young people don't want to identify as feminists because there
is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us."

You
must have heard about those accusations many, many times before! I
certainly have. I'm gorgeous, lurve men (especially with pesto and
garlic) and, sadly, fail to be anything but quite heterosexual. Well
OK. I'm not gorgeous. But I certainly am not frumpy! The gall, she
mutters.

All joking aside, those three accusations
don't have anything to do with each other. The first one states that
anyone wanting gender equality must hate men. That's pretty weird. The
second one argues, that women who want gender equality cannot be
attractive enough to get men in a system where women are second-class
citizens. Only unattractive women would want equality!

That's
illogical, too. Finally, one's sexuality has nothing to do with one's
desire for a gender-equal society. All illogical, says Echidne.

But
squint your eyes a bit, and you see the underlying pattern, what all
three of these things share: These women do not try to please men. Or
that's the suspicion of anyone using those accusations. Wanting
equality means not wanting to please men. Therefore, women who want
equality must hate men, be unattractive or prefer women in their
sexuality.

Now, I don't accept those accusations. I'm
also willing to admit that there have been feminists who hate men (but
nowhere near the numbers of MRA guys who hate women), that all social
justice movements have more or less frumpy people of both sexes in them
and so on. But no other social justice movement is taken to task for
anything similar. No other social justice movement needs to say "but of
course we love you, other guys!" or try to make sure that their members
are nicely made-up and properly behaved. It's only demanded of
feminism, and that, I suspect, is because of women's traditional roles
and traditional gender stereotypes.

Besides, the sexes
are not independent of each other, and statements which ostracize
feminism have a powerful impact because of that. Nobody wants to be
shunned by the groups of their peers, after all.

Second Class of Arguments

This crops up quite a bit in the comments. In the more sophisticated form it's a criticism of feminism as a political movement without intersectionality. In
the rougher forms the argument is about rich women perhaps being
slightly worse off than rich men but who cares? As one commentator
states, how do poor women get helped if some women become judges or
famous television personalities? Her life remains the same.

From
the latter angle feminism is unimportant because it is seen as a
movement which only focuses on wealthy, educated, white women who are
better off than, say, poor, uneducated, black men. Or poor women of any
race.

Here I want to draw a distinction between
feminism as-a-political-movement and feminism-as-a-theory. The two are
different, I've come to believe, and while intersectionality is
important in both fields, the idea that focusing on gender in isolation
isn't useful for anyone but the top women in the society is misplaced
when it comes to theory.

It helps to understand how
gender plays a role in the hierarchical ladders. One possible way that
game might go is that women are slightly worse off than men who are
otherwise the same in the kinds of things which determine the rung of
the ladder we inhabit. If that's the case, then poor women could be
slightly worse off than poor men, for instance.

Or
perhaps not. The question is ultimately an empirical one and the
studies must be done separately for each society. But that has been the
traditional setting when it comes to comparing men and women and it is
probably still valid in most countries of this world.

Beliefs
about the proper roles of men and women and beliefs about women's worth
have an impact on all members of the society, including its women.
Seeing powerful women performing well in areas which have not
traditionally allowed women that chance can change stereotypes and
sexist beliefs. In that sense what happens at the very top of the
society does matter to all women and men.

Those who
argue that the problems with sexism otherwise privileged women have
don't matter fail to understand that similar and worse problems affect
women further down the ladders. Not studying those problems will hurt
all women, ultimately.

I'm not sure how clear I have
been. There's a difference between intersectionality and between the
argument that feminism should be a social justice movement which
supports every cause and all people.

Intersectionality
plays a useful and important role. Turning feminism into some kind of a
general social justice movement would leave the question of gender
unexamined. Other social justice movements are unlikely to take up the
slack.

This class of arguments also fails to appreciate that much feminist writing IS about intersectionality.

And
to argue that some different cause (such as income inequality) is more
important than feminism is to fail to take into account the
intersectionality in that place. It also assumes that we must pick one
cause and focus on that alone. I don't know about you but I can run and
chew gum and plan my next blog post all at the same time.

Third Class of Arguments
These are the arguments that it is the men who are worse off in Western
societies. Feminists are accused of not working to reduce the rates of
male-on-male violence, including the rates of male suicide, or of not
trying for the most dangerous jobs in equal numbers or of not working to
get more fathers child custody in the case of a divorce.

Yet
a very consistent tone in the orchestra that is feminist music has
always focused on the evils that traditional gender roles can cause. A
few examples:

Mothers are more likely to get custody
in the case of a divorce when the society believes that mothers should
do the hands-on care of the children. Stay-at-home parents are more
likely to get custody than the family breadwinners, and the vast
majority of stay-at-home parents are women. (It's a completely
different question whether fathers, indeed, are treated especially
unfairly in custody courts. Evidence suggests that in most cases the
divorcing parents agree on who should have custody and when this is not
the case, fathers win at least one half of all the cases in the US.)

Traditional
definitions of masculinity have sometimes glorified violence. To the
extent that feminism has opposed such definitions, it has also opposed
one of the many causes for male-on-male violence.

The
most dangerous traditionally male jobs do not always welcome women with
open arms. Sexual harassment can be used as a way to defend one's
turf. It's important to note that women don't necessarily make a simple
choice not to become, say, firefighters. Also, as I've mentioned
before, prostitution is probably the occupation with the highest risk of
violent death, and it is a female-dominated occupation. But because it
is often an illegal one, its riskiness does not enter occupational
safety statistics.

It's a
damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't argument. Feminists should work
hard on men's liberation because women have more "choices" than men do.
But when feminists do suggest that men should be able to become
stay-at-home-parents or that men should be encouraged to react to anger
in ways other than violence, they become interfering bitches who disobey
biological imperatives and so on. It's hard for me to know what some
of these extremist MRA people want, because on the one hand they want
feminists to work for the liberation of men and on the other hand they
want the old-time gender roles to come back and feminists to shut up.

The
best way to address these issues (in addition to getting the actual
facts about them) is by pointing out that feminism wants equal
opportunities by gender and equal valuation of traditionally male and
female spheres of activity. Feminists who encourage women to take up
the bread-winning role or who encourage women to become firefighters or
police officers should please these types of MRA people, right? Because
that way more women will die in the dangerous jobs and more men will be
SAHDs and then get custody in the case of a divorce. Well, that last
sentence is only half-serious. The point is that much of feminist
agenda IS giving men more choices, should they want them.

Perhaps
one could also mention that violence IS studied a lot in the society,
and much of that study is about male-on-male violence. It's hard to see
what input the feminist movement with its meager funds could contribute
to what is already being done.

I have trouble with
this group of argument because it veers from one end to the other. At
one extreme, the argument is that the most traditional gender norms were
the correct ones. At the other extreme, feminists should work to
liberate men whom those traditional gender norms have enslaved.

Fourth Class of Arguments
This is another familiar one: The feminist movement was needed in the
past (and perhaps still is, in places like Saudi Arabia) but women in
the Western countries are now completely equal with men.

What
makes the argument familiar is that people wrote about it earnestly in
the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1930s and so on and so
on. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Women in the West
are certainly much better off now than, say, a hundred years ago. We
can vote, for one thing. But the Church of England still won't have
female bishops, the Catholic Church is an all-boys-club and so is
Islam. The number of women in the parliaments of most countries is
nowhere near 50%, sexual violence is still a problem and, most
importantly, misogyny still manages to exist.

I'm
grateful for the changes past generations of feminists spent their lives
bringing about. Very grateful. But I don't think the job is over and
done with. Whenever I feel like that, I go cruising on the net and get
my head put right again. All it takes is participation in some poorly
moderated forum while using a female-sounding pen-name. Or reading
YouTube comments...

And as long as we are not affecting the gender roles at home we will not see ultimate gender equality in the wider society.

Conclusion

To
conclude, let me state that, yes, some aspects of feminism have gone
astray in the past, and, yes, there are always ways to make the social
justice movement that is feminism more inclusive and more effective and
fairer. At the same time, the feminism of the past got women the vote,
fairer laws and fairer retirement benefits. It got women access to
schools and colleges and jobs. It got women mentioned in the history
books. It got women their own bank accounts and the right to enter
contracts. It cast light on the once-common belief that rape is a
shame for the victim and better kept hidden.

And today? We discuss how dirty a word "feminism" might be.

The
paradox of my kind of feminism is this: The problems of sexism have
been fixed when each individual is judged as an individual, not as a
representative of a whole gender. Yet the only way to see the
sexist treatment of any one individual is by looking at how it is
affected by the beliefs and prejudices and societal practices which
apply to one's whole gender.

That's what I have tried to do on this blog, over the years (send money!). It may not be the kind of feminism this Guardian
article or the comments attached to it discuss. It may not even be
feminism, who knows, and it may have very limited value. But from my
snake's-eye-viewpoint most of the arguments classes I amassed miss the
point of feminism, and it really is to remove that ankle-cuff with your
sex etched on it. So that we can all run free or something.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

I wrote two posts on this question, with the basic premise that I know nothing (except in a laygoddess way if one can even regard us divines as lay-anything), and that I was going to ask questions in these posts. But to be honest, I think female orgasm is there to make women more willing to have sex.

After reading them again, I'm more struck by the lack of interest in the female multiple orgasms. Research which looks pretty neutral often has an odd tilt, because the questions we feel are important are already embedded in our societal ideas.

Thus, it looks obvious (but is it?) that men need to orgasm to ejaculate, but that women don't have to orgasm to get pregnant, so we start from the assumption that the female orgasm is like a frilly collar. Nice to have, but probably not essential at all.

But if the female orgasm is just a happy byproduct of the male orgasm, how come many women routinely have multiple orgasms and very few men seem to have that knack? And how come that doesn't result in a vast field of research?

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

So tells us Suzanne Venker,* the resident misogynist at Fox News. Her whole article is deliciously hilarious, but the best bit is this:

Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through
adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany
of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His
oppression is unlike anything American women have faced. Unlike women,
however, men don’t organize and form groups when they’ve been
persecuted. They just bow out of the game.

I especially LOVE the idea that the oppression of white Murkan men is unlike anything Murkan women have faced! ** Given that universities didn't even use to let women in as students, Venker's long paragraphs about boys doing worse at school are pretty interesting. At least nobody is banning men from colleges by law. Indeed, many colleges practice hidden affirmative action to admit more men.

Venker's article is a good example of how to write propaganda. You ignore all evidence which does not support your argument and you replace statistical evidence with anecdotes.

As examples of the former, Venker says nothing about the fact that white men are the vast majority of all Americans with real power: Most CEOs are white men, most stockbrokers are white men, the military is led by white men, almost all religious leaders are men and most of them are white men. The majority of professors are white men and so is the majority of famous writers, painters and sculptors. There are more men on television than women, and men have more speaking roles in movies.

Indeed, it is very hard to think of any powerful roles which are not held by that horribly oppressed group: white American men.

The war on men actually begins in grade school, where boys are at a
distinct disadvantage. Not only are curriculums centered on girls’,
rather than boys,’ interests, the emphasis in these grades is on sitting
still at a desk. Plus, many schools have eliminated recess. Such an environment is
unhealthy for boys, for they are active by nature and need to run
around. And when they can’t sit still teachers and administrators often
wrongly attribute their restlessness to ADD or ADHD. The message is
clear: boys are just unruly girls.

So girls don't need recess? Eliminating it was done as part of the war on boys, I guess. And the design of the curriculum and the requirement to sit still are part of the same war. There's only one snag: The schools were, in fact, created only for boys a long time ago, and the current system is just a continuation of that design. Put in a different way, boys were always expected to sit still during classes, even when girls weren't allowed in at all.

I have written many times about the fact that even extremely patriarchal countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia have the same gender imbalance in colleges (until maximum quotas are put on girls/women) as the US. It's hard to see how any of this could be caused by some war on boys in the US. The real reasons are elsewhere.

But Venker doesn't care! She moves on to explain why Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in college, is oppressing men. There are two reasons.

First, demanding equal athletic resources to both sexes oppresses men because Venker believes that men are inherently more interested in sports. She applies familiar right-wing language to all this: we want equal opportunities, not forced equal outcomes:

Things are no better in college. There, young men face the perils of
Title IX, the 1972 law designed to ban sex discrimination in all
educational programs. Under Title IX, the ratio of female athletes is supposed to match the
ratio of female students. So if not enough women sign up for, say,
wrestling and ice hockey, well then: no more wrestling and ice hockey. What was once viewed equal opportunity for women has become something
else altogether: a demand for equal outcomes. Those are not the same
thing at all.

I think I'm in love with this woman because she is sooo funny!

What is the role of athletics in college? Either they are an important part of education, in which case male and female students should be required to participate in them equally, OR they are a benefit akin to swimming pools in hotels: A convenience. If they are the latter, and if men actually are more likely to enjoy sports for some innate reasons, why is this convenience provided without offering women something roughly equivalent?

That's a deep point, by the way, though the actual situation in US colleges is complicated by the fact that some male sports are also money-makers for colleges. Still, in many colleges providing athletic opportunities costs money. One might argue that requiring female students to pay for sports of the kind Venker wishes to see (where more men participate for innate reasons) could be unfair.

The other peril of Title IX, according to Venker, is utterly frightening for every single man in America:

Title IX is also abused when it comes to sex. In 1977, a group of
women at Yale used Title IX to claim sexual harassment and violence
constitute discrimination against women. Genuine harassment and violence should be punishable offenses,
obviously. But the college campus is a breeding ground for sexual
activity, which makes determining wrongdoing (and using Title IX to
prove it) extremely difficult. Sexual misconduct does not necessarily
constitute harassment—and women have as much of a role to play as men
do.Here again men are in an impossible situation, for there’s an unspoken commandment when it comes to sex in America: thou shalt never blame the woman. If you’re a man who’s sexually involved with a woman and something goes wrong, it’s your fault. Simple as that.

Bolds are mine. We are now wading in very muddy waters, where crocodiles suddenly lift their heads with gaping maws full of frightening teeth. To snap up innocent penises, probably.

The above quote and what follows it in Venker's article lacks any statistical data. She uses the opinion piece of one woman whose son was accused of sexual misdoings in college as evidence that college sexual harassment investigations always find men guilty.

If I wasn't on vacation and away from my archives I'd link here to at least two cases where the college procedures freed the accused men and I'd also link to the case (perhaps a school case) where a cheerleader who had accused one of the players of rape was made to cheer while the alleged rapist was in the field. And so on.

The point here is that anecdotal evidence tells us nothing. We don't even know if the young man in that opinion piece Venker mentions is innocent or guilty.

But according to Venker, whenever something "goes wrong" in a sexual relationship, it's the man who goes to prison. That is why American prisons are chock full of sentenced rapists and sexual harassers and so on and so on, and that is why women report every single rape so religiously.

Except that they do not report most rapes, and even the cases that are reported rarely lead to a conviction. But I'd really like to know what Venker means by something "going wrong" in a sexual relationship. Is it a euphemism for rape or for unsatisfactory sex or what? A malfunction?? And who decides when harassment is genuine and violence real? Suzanne Venker?

Poor, poor men. If the lack of recess didn't stifle them they got caught in the False Rape Accusation Conspiracy in college. And if they somehow got through all that still free and feisty, the Family Courts certainly finish them off:

When men become husbands and fathers, things get really bad. In
family courts throughout America, men are routinely stripped of their
rights and due process. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is easily
used against them since its definition of violence is so broad that
virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse.“If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man
and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” notes Dr. Helen Smith,
author of the new book, "Men on Strike." This is particularly heinous since, as Smith adds, violence in domestic relations “is almost 50% from men and 50% from women.”

Note the generalizing tone of the argument: "when men become husbands and fathers..." Every man appears to have his rights stripped in family courts, usually because some horrible woman accuses him of violence. And every man loses in the family court!

That is utter crap, of course. In fact, when divorcing spouses disagree on child custody, fathers are awarded custody in more than half the cases (I have links to this in my home archives).

And there are violent ex-partners. In Pennsylvania some years ago a mentally ill non-custodial father killed his children during one of his weekends with them. His ex-wife had tried to stop his visitation rights because of the danger caused by his particular state of mind but the Family Court sided with the man in that case.

The question of bias in family courts is an empirical question. In other words, it requires research, not stupid and unsupported statements such as “If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man
and men are just assumed guilty in our society,”

Venker's stuff is really weird. Here's another sweet thing: She argues that the VAWA defines violence so broadly that virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse. But the reference to the50/50 split in who initiates domestic violence is to a study which defines violence so broadly that almost anything qualifies as abuse. That study is also about the dating of quite young individuals, not about family violence. Data on the murders of men and women by their intimate partners does not show equal numbers of male and female perpetrators.

And the usual declaration:
None of what I say here is intended to mean that men are never mistreated or that there aren't serious problems that go with the traditional male gender role.

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of
Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has
pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become
self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to
love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect
their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

And:

Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn
everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature –
their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.

**If we go back far enough, married women had no rights to their own property or their own earnings, women were routinely barred from several types of occupations, night-work etc., female teachers could be fired when they got married or when they got pregnant, married women couldn't open a bank account without their husband's signature or get a loan without it, until quite recently, and so on.

That seems to be the new question in education debates. I wrote about it in February and then again in May.

I have some extra thoughts about education in general. We should NOT accept the new view of education as pretty much just what corporations want their workers to learn. We should fight that view, because real education matters far too much to be given such a narrow interpretation. Besides, what the corporations want from us can change in a flash.

Education should teach us how to think and how to judge information we receive. And all children should be taught arts, music and physical education, because they make our lives better and are an important part of being members of homo sapiens.

Monday, July 15, 2013

This old post from 2008 tells the reasons why I sometimes write about issues which seem trivial. My views haven't changed too much from those times, though today I'd probably write more on the battles within feminisms. What a worthy topic or subject is can be debated more widely than on the terms I took five years ago.

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